Kate Wickers has created a stunning collection of travel stories for Lodestars Anthology over the years … starting as far back as issue 4, Italy. So it’s an absolute joy to be able to share an extract from her travel memoir ‘Shape of a Boy, family life lessons in far-flung places’. This edited version of her chapter on Mexico and what the country taught her family about mortality is pared with Jimena Peck’s stunning images from Día de los Muertos.
A Lesson in Mortality, Mexico
Mexico was to be a care-free trip; a country to raise our spirits, where we would drink tequila, explore Mayan ruins, snorkel with turtles, and lose ourselves in after a very difficult year. My sister’s lovely husband, the boys’ much-loved uncle, had died unexpectedly of lung cancer. The realisation that death could come so quickly and mercilessly was something we were all still grappling with, and I was relying on Mexico, with its colourful culture and sun-filled days, to give us the respite we all so desperately needed.
Let’s be honest, Western culture doesn’t deal with death well. Even our plan to take the boys to Rob’s funeral proved controversial and, months later, Freddie had remained a little anxious, worrying about what would happen if my husband Neil or I died. Providing reassuring answers to my eight-year-old often proved difficult. The answer of ‘Nothing’s going to happen to me,’ was met with the very astute, ‘But how do you know?’
On arrival in Yucatan, we bypassed busy Cancun and headed to Hacienda Chichen Itza, built in the sixteenth century by Spanish conquistadors, and located in the grounds of Chichen Itza, Yucatan’s most celebrated Mayan ruins.
‘Is this really where we’re staying?’ Josh asked, exploring our cottage where archaeologist Dr Sylvanus Morley, head of the first Mayan expedition, stayed while reconstructing Chichen Itza’s temples in the early 1900s.
‘It’s like a museum,’ said Ben, sitting at the desk where Morley might well have sat to pore over excavation plans.
It was true that little had changed since that time (including the plumbing judging by the noise the toilet made when flushed), and it was simply decorated with hand-carved dark wood furniture, with the kind of bed you might expect to find the big bad wolf lying in.
It also had one other unique selling point – a modest garden gate, the very same one that the first archaeologists had stepped through to explore, and it was opened for guests a whole hour before the official opening time of the site. At 9a.m. next morning we hurried through, keen to view one of the new Seven Wonders of the World – the 25-metre-high Castillo de Kukulcan – before other tourists flocked in. Designed with mathematical brilliance to represent the Mayan Calendar, it’s part pyramid, part clock, part fortress and wholly impressive. I’d arranged to meet a local guide there, who would give us a behind-the-scenes tour of the ruins.
A cheery greeting of ‘Hola’ came our way and I turned to see a young guy with long hair pulled into a ponytail, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses and a t-shirt that had ‘Touched by Jesus’ printed on it, and in much smaller lettering underneath, ‘In a Mexican Prison’.
‘Hi, I’m Jesus,’ he said.
It’s a name so common in Mexico that by the end of the trip we’d met several, but as he was our first ‘Jesus’ the boy’s snorts of amusement were hard to ignore.
Jesus marched us off briskly to the centre of an impressive oblong court known as the Juego de Pelota.
‘You know basketball?’ he asked the boys.
They nodded. In mentioning sport, Jesus now had them in the palm of his hand.
‘Well, this is where the Mayans played basketball but with one very big difference,’ he went on. ‘Want to guess what that was?’
‘Were the hoops smaller?’ suggested Ben.
‘The ball was smaller, the hoops were smaller, and there were lots of them hanging along the top of the walls, but that’s not it,’ he told them.
‘Did you kick the ball?’ asked Josh.
‘Aha! Now you’re getting closer. They had to pass it to each other using everything but their hands and look how high the rings were.’
We looked up to the top of the court where the holes that held the stone rings could still be seen.
‘That’s impossible,’ said Josh.
‘Almost. The game ended on the first goal and often that took hours to score, but there was one other big difference,’ Jesus told us. ‘The captain of the losing team was sacrificed by having his head chopped off.’ We watched Jesus run a slow finger across his neck.
We followed him to where gruesome graphic images of decapitations were sculpted into the wall. ‘You think that’s bad, come with me,’ Jesus said, leading us on to the Plataforma de los Cráneos, which was decorated with images of eagles ripping open human chests and feasting upon the hearts.
‘This platform was used to display the heads of sacrificial victims,’ Jesus told us cheerily.
At Cenote Sagrado (a scared limestone sinkhole) we stared into murky green water. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t believe the number of human remains they’ve dredged from here,’ Jesus said. ‘Human sacrifices didn’t just involve having your head chopped off. Sometimes they tied rocks to your feet and made you jump into the water.’
It wasn’t Jesus’s fault that beyond the Mayans’ interest in all things astrological and mathematical, they were a blood thirsty lot. Decapitations, sacrifices, human remains, death, death and more death weren’t quite what I’d had in mind for lifting our spirits. We ended our tour with Jesus informing us that Mayans weren’t averse to eating human flesh in cannibalistic feasts.
We decided to give Mayan history a rest for a few days and looked to Yucatan’s natural beauty and wildlife to cheer us up. The 146,000-acre Celestún Bio-Reserve, where thousands of flamingos flock annually to nest and breed, looked like the perfect place to start. I love these daft birds, at their most curious in the air when their necks and legs are equal distance from their wings, which makes them look like they are flying backwards. And talking of daft, local people were splashing in and out of the water within snapping distance of a crocodile.
‘That’s risky! Aren’t they scared?’ I asked the skipper of our boat.
‘Oh no. They believe in what will be will be. Either the crocodile will eat them or not.’
It was such a different way of looking at things.
‘But they’d be less likely to be eaten if they weren’t in the water,’ suggested Josh.
‘If that is their death, then the crocodile will find them.’
‘What if you live in a high-rise flat in Mexico City?’ asked Ben.
‘They might work at a zoo,’ suggested Freddie.
Having grown up with the Western belief that you oversaw your own destiny, this acceptance of fate was a hard one not to challenge, particularly when, like Josh, you have recently joined the ranks of teenagers and, like Ben, you were on the cusp of becoming one. I was beginning to appreciate the everyday intimacy Mexicans have with the subject. To them, it was just part of life. The more time I spent in Mexico, the more ridiculous the Western avoidance of talking about death was beginning to seem.
I knew it was only a matter of time before the subject of the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead festival, came up, and that happened two days later, as we found ourselves staring at a papier mâché figure in Casa de los Venados – a restored colonial house, decorated with more than three thousand pieces of Mexican folk art in the city of Valladolid. This gave me the perfect opportunity to broach the ‘D’ word again.
Among the collection were grinning papier mâché skeleton dogs and skulls wearing sombreros, but it was a cheeky-looking skeleton riding a bicycle and wearing a jaunty straw hat that had caught Freddie’s eye.
‘Do you like them?’ I asked, pointing to grinning skeleton cat.
Freddie nodded.
‘Mexicans like to poke fun at death,’ I continued. ‘It doesn’t worry them at all. They even have parties in the graveyards every year during the Day of the Dead festival, so the people they love who’ve died don’t miss out.’
‘But they’re dead,’ said Ben.
‘Not to the people who love them. The belief is the dead are given a one-day pass to return to see their families.’
‘Not really?’ asked Freddie, looking alarmed.
‘Well, it’s not like you see them,’ I quickly explained.
‘Sounds a bit creepy,’ commented Josh.
‘For them, it’s a lovely way of remembering the people they love. They bring gifts and food to the graves, and if it’s a young child who has died, they bring toys. Mexicans believe that you’re not really dead until the last memory of you fades.’
I mentally ticked a box. Death had been mentioned and in a positive way, associated with festivities. The idea took a bit of getting used to, but I could see that they were mulling it all over, even if they were a little freaked out by the idea of a party on a grave.
‘Know who would have loved these figures? Uncle Rob.’
Rob had been an artist and had been full of fun. I could hear him having a chuckle over these works of art while appreciating the creativity that had gone into their execution. I realised it was the first time we’d talked about Rob without being sad, which, with so many lovely memories of him to share, felt like a huge step forward.
Perhaps a coincidence, but while staying in Mérida, I noticed a change in the boys. We took a trip out to a nearby cenote (sinkhole), just one in Yucatan’s vast underground network of caves, subterranean rivers and sinkholes. At 20 metres below ground level, and partially open to the sky, access to it was by a slippery moss-carpeted wooden staircase on one side. Vines and small waterfalls cascaded down the other and in the natural pool at the bottom we floated on our backs alongside the catfish, shrieking at every stroke of passing fin. Life suddenly felt good again.
On our drive back into the city, the traffic suddenly slowed.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Ben.
‘Funeral,’ our driver told us. ‘Want to get out and take a look?’
Never in a million years would you be asked that question in the UK, but already the suggestion felt normal. He pulled the car over and we jumped out.
A little shyly, we joined the crowd. More carnival procession than funeral march, a mariachi band followed the priest at the front. Family members and friends escorted the coffin, for now chatting and smiling. I knew that the outpouring of grief would come later at the grave.
‘Perhaps he was a musician because look at the flowers,’ I told Freddie, pointing to where, on top of the coffin, a floral arrangement was in the shape of a perfect guitar.
‘And is that a picture of Elvis on the side of the coffin?’ Josh wanted to know.
I grabbed Freddie’s hand and we crossed the road to get a better look. On closer inspection, we decided that it wasn’t Elvis, but a picture of the deceased, who could easily have passed for Elvis’s Mexican brother with his jet-black coiffed hair and sideburns.
Was it strange to be following the coffin of a man we didn’t know, discussing his hobbies and hair style? Perhaps a little. Was it sad or disturbing? Not at all.
‘You could have flowers in the shape of a wine bottle,’ joked Josh to me.
I heard Freddie stifle a giggle.
I think it was true to say that Mexico had done the trick. While we weren’t perhaps laughing in the face of death, the subject was no longer taboo, and even extended to my sons making jokes about my own demise. That might take a bit of getting used to.
‘I’d love that,’ I replied, and meaning every word.
Kate Wickers’ travel memoir ‘Shape of a Boy, family life lessons in far-flung places’ (Aurum, £16.99) is published in the UK on 18 January 2022; North America on February 15; Australia & New Zealand on April 1.
Follow Kate @wickers.kate
